


Putting Up The Lights

by RoryKurago



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Memorials, Post-Movie(s), Pre-Movie(s), Shatterdome Family, Sydney Shatterdome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 02:46:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3102668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every year the crew puts up the lights on the 'dome Memorial Wall. It isn’t what it sounds like. It’s the kind of thing that makes you sick at heart and fills your veins with lead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Putting Up The Lights

**Author's Note:**

> Technically part of 31 Days Of PacRim but kind of darker than the rest, in a similar vein to Building A Snowman.

 

Every year the crew puts up the lights on the 'dome Memorial Wall. It doesn't mean what you think.

\- - - - - - - - - - -

You are sixteen, and the crew have a game. Less a game. More of a ritual.

They call it _putting up the lights_ and it isn’t what it sounds like. It’s the kind of thing that makes you sick at heart and fills your veins with lead.

 - - - - - - - - - - -

You are eighteen and you have the game figured out. You help an elite squad of four particularly slippery, light-fingered bastards steal half a dozen bottles of spirits from a supply depot. (You don’t wonder at how conveniently close to the back door the crate you lift them from was.) You’re still not invited to join.

 - - - - - - - - - - -

You are twenty, and you have never been permitted to take part in the ritual. This is for the crew.

You are many things. You are brave, and strong, and highly intelligent, and _Commander_. But you are not crew.

You aren’t sure if the exclusion stings or it’s just your nerve-endings recovering from a bad tech test with the new circuitry suits. Your heart leans against your calf and you decide they can have this. This is one thing. You don’t need this. But you watch every year.

 - - - - - - - - - - -

You are forty-five and you've been invited to take part in the ritual every year for two decades. These memories of being barred are not your own but they are yours, the same way the memories of a Kiowa descending in your school sports field and the crunch of your nose breaking as Raleigh kicks you with a steel-capped boot are yours.

You have never taken part in putting up the lights until December 2025.

But on the allotted day, December 19, you stand with the other dregs of the Corps in that hanger, pour a shot in memory of every dead face you carry inside you from the beginning of the War, add it to the hundred others on the bench under the Shatterdome Memorial Wall and set it alight.

A drink for everyone who has passed ahead. A bank of lights against the Minute of Darkness, when every light in the ‘dome goes out in remembrance of dark days. Putting up the lights for the dead.

 - - - - - - - - - - -

_You are nineteen, and you don’t understand why the crew look so irate when you say you want to put up a light for your uncle._

_They look at the Crew Chief. The Crew Chief looks at a female deck-tech, who doesn’t look at anyone, and flatly tells you the crew only put up lights for people they_ want _to remember._

_You still don’t get it._

_You go looking in the next Drift. You get it._

_This is the one year you don’t watch the crew. Instead, you go to a quiet pub in town and order two shots. Arms folded on the bartop, you study them for a minute._

_Then you drink both._

**Author's Note:**

> #I CANNOT WRITE FLUFF #it got worse #send help #the crew is legion #don't think about all the people who've died #don't think about wall-to-wall plates made of metal and stone and scrap carved and painted and burnt with the names of the names of the faceless #don't think about the families left behind #or the fact that once the Working Group shuts down the Jaeger Program every life that burnt up in fighting for humanity's right to exist#will be invalidated by the leaders' decision to call it all a mistake and hide #send help


End file.
